Open vs Closed java on linux (was: Re: [Nottingham] What distro?)

[Martin Garton]

On Thu, 2006-05-25 at 08:42 +0100, Michael Erskine wrote:
> On Wednesday 24 May 2006 18:09, Dean Sas wrote:
> 
> > Java is in both Ubuntu (6.06s Multiverse) and Debian (non-free). MP3
> > support is also in Ubuntus Universe. Only wmv, quicktime and realplayer
> > aren't in the repos as far as I know.
> 
> Dean, I think you're missing the point I was labouring: this target user 
> apparently wants it all installed from the outset without having to resort to 
> any form of package management - least of all changing package sources. And 
> the Java you refer to is gcj - have you tried running Netbeans or Eclipse 
> under gcj? All credit to the developers but it is still unusable IMHO.

I haven't tried netbeans, but last time I tried eclipse (on FC4 I think)
it ran slightly slower than under sun java, but started up faster.  It
also appears to be highly dependent on gcj version and gnu classpath
version.  It might be worth trying again.

Progress of open java is interesting.  One reason that open java has
taken (and still is taking) longer to progress on linux than open .NET
is that there is closed java available and people choose that by default
because it's more convenient, so the open implementations don't get much
testing.  If everyone chose an open implementation (as they are forced
to do for .NET on linux) and took a few minutes to report bugs if it
didn't work for them, we would have a better faster more robust open
java in no time.

-- 
Martin.